Managing Information Technology under Extreme Organizational Disequilibrium: the Case of Corporate Spinoffs

This paper studies the strategic management of information technology in periods of extreme organizational disequilibrium. In such periods, critical business parameters such as industry positioning, competitive strategies, organizational structures, leadership, and business processes change significantly and simultaneously, thus disrupting the very fundamental bases for strategic IT decisions. Corporate spinoffs represent such an extreme case for spun-off businesses that have to adjust most critical business parameters in a compressed timeframe and under severe resource constraints. Based on in-depth case studies on five spun-off businesses, we found that strategic IT management in the period of extreme disequilibrium largely reflected the priority of stabilizing business operations to ensure business survival. However, when organizations take shortcuts and make inadequate anticipatory IT investments, they compromise their long-term prosperity after new equilibrium emerges. A theoretical model of strategic IT management is proposed in the context of corporate spinoffs when concluding the study.